by James Turley

There is a perfectly fascinating experience to be had on your way to Tate Modern’s current Turbine Hall exhibition, Global Cities. First, one emerges from Southwark tube station, and is immediately confronted with the brand new Palestra building at 197 Blackfriars Road, a glass office monolith with a wonky top (ker-azee!) and a bunch of random flourescent panels. What is it for? Who knows? Various capitalists, the London Development Agency and – in a nice post-modern twist – the London Climate Change Agency, whose charter has required 14 tiny windmills to be installed on the roof.

One then proceeds past this monstrosity, following the signs to the gallery, until a certain point where Union Street doglegs to the right a little. Gaze down its length to see Guy’s Hospital – even among hospitals, a particularly awesome example of what Marcel Breuer called “the monumentality of sheer mass”. As a teaching hospital, it embodies two of the main strands of the post-war settlement; with its tower-block look, it hints at the third, social housing too (with an added note of “near-future maximum security prison”). Unlike Palestra, it knows exactly what it is for – an enormous, stout middle finger to petty-bourgeois philistinism and big-bourgeois penny-pinching.

Dutifully turn left up Great Suffolk Street, past a building site of mock-period…err…yuppie flats? to find, on the crossroads with Southwark Street, another great glass elevator. Is it a shopping mall? Is it an office building? Who knows – probably not even the planning department…At which point, one finds oneself at Tate Modern itself, the ultimate example of what you might call the “production of post-modernity” – constant capital: one disused power station; variable capital: countless engineers, artists and builders; resultant commodity: a structural frame for bourgeois consumption of cultural artefacts.

All of which is an infinitely more edifying experience than the exhibition itself.

To be frank, the only way the big-wigs at Tate could have filled the turbine hall with quite so much sheer smugness is if they’d put in a 200 foot bucket of latte. The substance of the exhibition consists of walls and walls of pseudo-profound “big questions” (‘are cities compatible with social justice?’) and statistics pulling apart (allegedly) the day to day existence of 10 cities, combined with “educational” videos doing the same and a number of “art” videos (bourgeois consumptionists, fear not – they are rigorously labelled as such so you know when you’re to enjoy yourself and when to feel like you’re in school) ramming home particularly salient points according to the named themes: size, speed, form, density and diversity. Some of the art exhibits are pretty good – some stunning, and horrifying, photographs of Mumbai and Sao Paulo, and a bizarre video of the faithful trooping across a perilous tidal path to a Mosque in the former.

Finally, there are some specially commissioned exhibits from artists and architects, which are almost uniform in their fist-biting banality. The one major exception is the architect Rem Koolhaas’ exhibit on the “new urbanism”, which combines diverse photographs with a thoughtful text which covers the relationship between urban planning, trends in architecture and big capital. Even he, however, briefly skirts the abyss by informing us that when you get the Yen, Euro and dollar signs together you have “¥€$”.

Seriously, man – what the fuck? Is Koolhaas in the MIM now?

(NB: a far more thoughtful review of this will appear in the Weekly Worker at some point.)